In fact these cars came as a RAUH Begriff right from the factory. All that rust colored brake dust and dirt? Earned track crud!
Rough warrior, put away dirty.
First off, I don't care what anyone says, it takes balls to keep the hammer down in a car you don't know at Daytona. Eric, my team mate, had driven Daytona once before, in the 2009 edition of the One Lap, it made the most sense for him to take on the time trial there. I got to drive a couple of parade laps on the banking and let me tell you, even a cruising speed it's intimidating.
So how did the stock engined, CX of a brick MCoupe end up with a genuine gps verified 158.9 mph? That's what, 175 indicated with my car's 10% over speedo error? I don't even think the dial goes that high!!
Perhaps a little help came from my taping job on all the (huge) panel gaps in the front and side of the hood, the car went 3mph faster than the non taped version in the previous session. Perhaps the two Contour cameras hanging off the rear quarter panels acted as vortex generators and cut down on the vacuum crated by the hatchback shape... or at least it's fun to think that.
(Eric praying he does not crash...)
In any case, I suspect the key to a fast lap at Daytona is not just the top speed on the banks but the time in the infield. Eric's best lap, the second was 2:15 which is not that bad considering the car was on stock sized wheels and stock sized street tires. By comparison CG had done 2:07 in his Cayman S race car with Hoosiers the first time he was there. The final lap might have been faster but Eric was balked badly into turn 1 by a clueless Evo driver from the Great White North. Doesn't matter, the Z3MCoupe was faster than Eric had gone in the super fancy Carbon FIber Z4 MCoupe he drove in 2009....so there, another notch in the M-Shoe!
On the way to picturesque Kershaw South Carolina, my co-driver Eric had been singing the praises of a fried chicken shack he had discovered two year earlier, when he ran the One Lap with the famous TC Kline Carbon Coupe. Needless to say the place was shut down when we got there Sunday night so I figured that was that.
Eric was more determined and next day he would be off on a fried chicken mission from god! Not just for us mind you, he was nice enough to go around half the pit lane and take orders, lots of orders and then took off with the car.
Thing is, this place cooks the chicken from scratch and they sure were very happy to have such a huge order on a Monday. Eric met the whole family, they reminisced about large fried chicken orders of yore, probably sang songs and took pictures...meanwhile back at the track the afternoon session was starting and about an hour and half had gone by. I was getting more and more steamed and had visions of Eric having wrapped the Coupe around a pole or in a fight over US health care policy in south east Asia... Frantic, I called "Hey, people are really nice, the whole family came down, we took pictures and I did and interview about the chicken..."
"F*ck the chicken" I yelled into the phone "get back here, NOW!" Well, I'm Italian, I yell too much, I leave what I said off the phone to your imagination....
Anyway, Eric got back eventually and I had time to put some gas in the car and get out on track in a car smelling of the chicken everyone on pit lane was enjoying but me... it really was delicious, even cold...really...I recommend it.
I liked Carolina Motorsport Park better though, a very cool track I had never seen in a car before my out lap. Would love to go back one day.
Video was shot with Contour cameras overlayed with Traqmate data via Traqstudio software.
It's just that posting from the road with the brutal transfer leg schedule and the cramped car has been more challenging than I thought.
We are starting day 6 today at Barber Motorsports in Alabama then right after the Time Trials we have a 700 mile leg to Autobahn Country Club in Illinois for an 8AM start tomorrow.... see what I mean?
Anyway, we are first in class and 17th overall as of yesterday's Time Trials at Circuit Grand Bayou in Luisiana. Oh, and did I tell you the old M Coupe went 158.76 MPH on the Daytona bankings? Not bad for a 10 year old car!
You can check results HERE and our Flick slide show is after the jump.... no sleep till Brooklyn!
Day2 of the Tire Rack One Lap of America started at Summit Point, every one there early in the morning after getting in late the night before. The first real time trial was going to see the big dog , high horsepower cars shine. The Godzillas did not disappoint, I unofficially clocked Leh Keen in the TopSpeed Motorsports Nissan GT-R do a 1:23 lap...from a standing start! His fast lap was a 1:17 on street tires... just amazing combination of car AND driver.
Speaking of, I messed up our morning heat. The car felt awful with weird breakaway midcorner, not confidence inspiring on the key fast corner of Summit. I came in 33rd overall only to remember I had not reset the shocks after the autocross run no wonder the car felt wrong. Before the afternoon run, and after a quick phone conference with CG, the other end of the Axis of Oversteer, I changed the balance so the car would push and lopped off 13 seconds from my cumulative time! The afternoon limited the damage and we ended the day in 6th overall, first among the competing BMW. Not bad for an old car!
After the event wrapped we drove to South Carolina where, tomorrow, we'll rung at carolina Motorsport Park and the BMW PErformance Center, then we drive to Daytona! I must be insane.
Here is video from Contour and Traqmate overlay (with apologies to Risi,) of the second session. Cars get one reconnaissance lap then three laps from a standing start are added for the final result.
It was long getting here, it was not easy, there was a bit of heartbreak with the V8 M Coupe not working out but we did it.
The replacement is my 2001 S54 M Coupe i (not a z4 coupe..), pressed into service at the last minute.
We had no choice but to run the original "tiny" wheels but I also had no choice but to buy a new set of tires. I went with the new Michelin Super Sports. Good choice, the little M Coupe was second overall in the wet skid pad, by just .001 G. with a .825 I had assumed the 4wd cars would destroy in the wet but no...
Later in the afternoon, fortified by a couple of Full Strength meal shakes we drove to Grissom Air Force for the autocross and, once again the Super Sports performed incredibly well for such "small" oem sized rubber. We placed 12th overall, enough to have us tied for the overall lead of the race. Nice.
Tomorrow we move on to track events and fully expect for the big horsepower cars to steamroll....
We are in the 2011 Tire Rack One Lap of America but not as hoped in the carbon V8 MCoupe. It's a dissapointement for all involved but, as you read here, we experienced an unexpected and as of yet unexplained engine failure at our VIR test. There was just no time to have the engine rebuilt for the One Lap, but Dinan, Apex and Trinity Motorsports are hard at work to get it sorted for the Grassroots Motorsports Ultimate Track Car Challenge later this summer.
We don't like to give up or let you down, so I volunteered my BMW S54 M Coupe which I drove yesterday from NYC to Lima, Ohio. Today, at Trinity Motorsports, Shawn and the guys will get all new fluids in an transfer as many bits as possible over from the black carbon car and later today, Eric and I will drive the resulting Frankencoupe up to South Bend ready for tomorrow's start!
Stay tuned, check our twitter feed (@axisofoversteer) and Facebook page for updatesend of post
Not good news from the second day of testing at VIR I'm afraid. The problems we had the first day seemed to multiply culminating into our having to shut down the engine due to what we suspected to be a major internal failure, this despite never having the chance to be run hard on track.
All is not lost, if we find an engine replacement by Tuesday there is conceivably time to drop it in but, as you can imagine, the situation is less than optimal.
This is the video of the final try, when the engine really let go...
On the plus side, our clutch issues were solved and were the brake bias/no ABS issues and the car really did handle quite nicely. There is noticeable downforce from the wing and splitter and the giant Michelin PS2 provided good grip. One day, when it's fully sorted, this car will be a beast.
We get more news during the day monday, keep you posted.
More pictures from the David Murry Track Days even at VIR after the jump
Very frustrating day but hey, that's what test days are for yeah? Al sorts of little problems popped up today and the result was very little running and much time spent on a lift. Shawn from Trinity Motorsports and Alex from Apex Speed managed to get through most of the issues with the rest to be addressed between here and the the start of the One Lap (including getting ABS to work, that's a big one.).
Tomorrow is another day, and hopefully we'll get some proper seat time because us running laps in the Sentra rental car was embarrassing the many Porsche drivers present... I think most of the 997 GT3 RS II in the US were here today at the David Murry Track Days event!
The first firing of the Brum BMW Z3M V8: Oh so sweet! Congratulation to Shawn and the team, now let's tune the sucker. Check out the sound especially you surprising number of haters, still think this is just a run of the mill M5 engine?
Shawn writes: "This is the initial start-up of the DInan V8 in the Brum BMW Z3 MV8... Very smooth for the first start, great oil pressure, no leaks, well no fluid leaks... We have touch of an exhaust leak... Sounds like what just won the 24 Hour and the last GT race at Homestead..."
UPDATE: bonus video after the jump with the first easy revving of the beast!
Shawn: "We were doing a throttle response test... Time to tidy up the installation, build the air inlets and air cleaner box. Finish the power steering and head to the chassis dyno!" .
OK, some of you guys guessed right, the car my friend Eric and I will be driving is, well let's be honest, probably the nuttiest street legal BMW M Coupe in existence in North America.
What used to be a sedate S52 engined M Coupe is not a Carbon fiber clad animal powered by a 600HP racing V8. What could possibly go wrong?
This M Coupe is the dream of Dr. Eric Brum who has owned it from new and steadily built it up to what you will see here. Eric is a long time Axis reader and of course I was ecstatic when he asked me to co-drive the car in this year's One Lap of America. How could you say no to driving such a mad car?
OK let's go over some of the details starting with the body:
Carbon Fiber hood saving about 55 lbs
Carbon Fiber roof saving about 40 lbs (from the original with sunroof)
Carbon Fiber front bumper cover with splitter and additional cooling ducts
Of course putting all this together requires not just, Eric considerable energy but sone serious technical knowhow, in this case the wizards are:
Shawn Bayliff of Trinity Motorsports in Ohio. A racer with experience in Daytona Prototype and Porsche Cup car preparation, Shawn is the man who installed the engine in the car. He is also responsible for the carbon Fiber fabrication.
Dusty Renteria, Dinan Engineering, lead the engine building and tuning. His goal was power combined with the reliability needed to complete the almost 3600 miles of the One Lap.
Neel Vasavada, Apex Speed Technology, is responsible for managing electronic integration, including ECU, ABS and traction control.
These guys were asked to produce a lightweight BMW Z3 M Coupe with 600 hp from a bulletproof engine while still maintaining street drivability, a comfortable interior, and the original exterior design elements...an M Coupe perfectly suited for One Lap of America, the descendant of the legendary Cannonball Rally and the most grueling week of racing in America. This year One Lap will bring drivers in street-legal racecars from Tire Rack Headquarters in Indiana, through West Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama before returning north to Illinois and Indiana for a variety of time trials, drag racing, autocrossing, and skid pad challenges...all in the span of one week!
Like I said, what could possible go wrong? The engine is supposed to be fired up this week, as soon as it does we'll try to bring you at least a sound clip so, stay tuned. In the meantime revel in the huge build gallery after the jump.
As anyone who has ever driven behind me at a track in the past year or so can attest, my car always tended to, ahem, spew a touch of differential fluid.
This was not really BMW's fault, the differential I had in the car was not the "good for fuel economy but not so good for the track" 3.15 unit the MZ3 came with but an 80's vintage 3.46 unit from a 6 series and, to be honest, it looked like a piece raised from the Titanic when it was put in.
That's not inherently a bad thing, it's just that the unit probably had 200K miles on it. The gear ratio is a good one for the car and lap times at all the tracks I visited dropped considerably. However, heavy use soon took its toll and what started as nuisance became a smelly stream of burnt brown crap covering the back of my car and other people's windshields. Not good.
For a while I made the mistake of trying to cure the leak, the symptom of the problem, rather than trying to figure out why fluid was coming out in the first place. Mistake of course.
Earlier this year I went to Watkins Glen with Group52 and was forced to quit after only one session, the first time I ha a mechanical interrupt a track day in seven years. The differential got extremely loud and I was black flagged for the nasty stuff spewing from the back of my car.
It was silly to have worried about venting when in fact the differential was running so hot that the plastic speed sensor mechanism completely melted! You can see in the picture what remained of the part. The damage inside the case was not immediately obvious so we figured the problem was with the front bearing.
I limped home from the Glen with a a whine so loud it made telephone conversations impossible, not much choice but to get a rebuild. Dan Fitzgerald's Diffsonline.com was the most highly recommended and a few calls later I had a newly rebuilt unit on the way. The new differential in not just a stock factory LSD unit but a much more specialized ramped variable lock build. So what's the difference?
This past week end most of the Axis was at Lime Rock with NASA and I was most curious to find out how the new differential compared. It had been quite a while since I had driven at the Connecticut club but the last time I was there my best lap times were in the mid 1:02 range, this past Saturday my best was a 1:00.7. It was not all about the differential of course, the track has been repaved, tires might be different, I got better, lots of factors but car did behave in a different manner.
The first thing I noticed was more stability under threshold braking with the rear feeling much sell squirrelly. The next sensation is that mid-corner the car does not want to oversteer as much when lifting. This surprised me, I would have thought the opposite. I used more aggressive lifts or left foot braking to rotate the car in Big Bend, that worked.
The best part though was corner exit, way more thrust and much more control, very nice.
You can find some video clips after the jump. Next up we'll have some much more exciting racing footage from Lime Rock so stay tuned.
I have been mulling around this post for a while then, an email from one of our readers reminded me it's time for an update.
You haven't seen posts about our track days, cars, mods etc for a while now. So, what happened? Well, this year it worked out kind of funny, in my case the MCoupe needed a bit of loving, CG and the Freep have been swamped with work and have not been to the track as much. Still Freep was at Octoberfest up at the Glen instructing and clowning around on snow tires. CG and Adil will be Monday and Tuesday at the Glen immersed in Group 52 greatness. So if you are there and you see the Martini-ExigeS or Adil's 997S (ex CG by the way) stop by and say hello.
Stee is going to be at Summit Point next week end for the NASA races, he has the black Boxster in GT3. He is ready, finally with proper tires and an increasingly well prepared car.
As for me, I'm screwed for a little while longer. Last time I was at Pocono my engine started making this rather loud "clacking" sound. It was similar to the noise e36 m3's make when they come off the track except, louder. I thought maybe a valve adjustment was in order and I was right but that was not all. Turns out one of the valve lifters on the exhast side of cylinder number six had cracked. Bad news for me was that it scored the camshaft so my best option was a new cam. I could have opted for "hot" cams but given the cost involved and that there was no other planned upgrade (like headers, intake, software etc.) the gain would have been minimal. I decided to save it for tires and gas.
As it turns out it was a good call. The M Coupe is approaching 50,000 miles and a good 40.000 of those have been either at the track or on some nasty bumpy parking lot dodging orange cones, there are consequences perhaps not foreseen by the designers....
Running r-comp tires puts huge stresses on the car and basically if you do this, you need to consider all systems consumables. So while the coupe is up off the ground getting the shocks rebuilt (Konis converted to double adjustable by ProParts) some attention will be paid to the body structure.
I previously had the anti- sway bar hook up points on the trailing arms reinforced, the two middle pivots holding the bushings were now weak and sure enough one popped so now those pints will be hardened.
I had a half shaft flange almost pop out of my differential at Watkins Glen... sure enough the rear trailing arm bushings (Ireland Engineering, urethane) are worn out and allowed some movement.
The flex disk, the mysteriously named "Guibo" is cracked so that will be replaced, a good time to do it since on the MCoupe that means removing most of the exhaust. Finally front shock towers will be reinforced while I'm at it.
Ordinary DIY maintenance will include fitting a new set of front Performance Friction rotor rings and changing brake fluid.
Once the car is buttoned back up it will of course get aligned.
Also the Freep along with Thumper the MasterBlaster worked on my leaking differential. The problem was that the seal between the pumpkin and the M finned cover was not good. They put it back together using a new fancy type of liquid gasket BMW and Mercedes are now recomending and it seems to have worked, all dry back there.
So soon enough I'll be able to roll again and will be able to hunt down the Freep who broke my heater switch. See you at the track!
We had a slight visibility issue at Pocono East this past Saturday.
CG, Stee and I were there to get in a last little bit of practice before our upcoming trip. You'd think we were in the Westphalian forests...but no, Pennsylvania in May! I was actually hoping for rain but instead we just spent most of the day inside a cloud.
Still, it eventually cleared up enough that you could see the turns and we got some runs in. I had a blast running the MCoupe on street tires in the first session. Pocono East is low speed and twisty, a great place for some douchy sideways action. The MCoupe with my stiff suspension and skinny tires is pretty silly stuff: no front end grip and come to think of it not much rear grip either... weeee.
Later I did put proper rubber on, the video below is my best lap. The Boxster in front is Stee's "Axis Plan A", with the 3.4 carrera engine. Once all issues are sorted, that car is going to be f.great! CG is driving it in the video and as you can tell towards the end, the car is a proper Axis of Oversteer car!
We are in the 2011 Tire Rack One Lap of America but not as hoped in the carbon V8 MCoupe. It's a dissapointement for all involved but, as you read here, we experienced an unexpected and as of yet unexplained engine failure at our VIR test. There was just no time to have the engine rebuilt for the One Lap, but Dinan, Apex and Trinity Motorsports are hard at work to get it sorted for the Grassroots Motorsports Ultimate Track Car Challenge later this summer.
We had a slight visibility issue at Pocono East this past Saturday. 
